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Max Planck: Founder of Quantum Theory

Barry R. Masters

Max Planck’s scientific career spanned some of the most turbulent times in German history—the Wilhelmian Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Through it all, he advanced and protected physics, with his own research evolving from theoretical physics that was firmly grounded in thermodynamics to his blackbody distribution law, which forced him to invoke non-classical ideas.